The secure line to your servers
A fast, small, open-source SSH & SFTP client for the desktop. Terminal, file transfer, and tunnels in one window — plus a tamper-evident audit log, searchable history, and a heads-up when a host's config changes since you last connected. Your credentials stay in your OS keychain; nothing phones home.
Built for people who connect to real servers and want to trust the tool doing it.
Passwords and passphrases live in the native OS keychain — macOS Keychain, Windows Credential Manager, or the Linux Secret Service. Never in a plaintext config file.
Every connect, transfer, key install, and credential change is appended to a hash-chained log whose head is sealed in your keychain. One click verifies the chain — or shows exactly where it was altered.
Find that command or output from three weeks ago on any host. Session history is recorded locally and searchable in-app — no more scrolling a dead terminal buffer.
Opt in per host, and Hawser snapshots the config it reads on connect — then flags, with a diff, anything that changed since your last visit. Catch drift before it bites.
The SSH stack is russh — no system OpenSSL or libssh2 to patch, no vcpkg, no C toolchain surprises. Small binary, reproducible builds.
An optional AI panel suggests commands and explains output using your own API key. It never runs anything on its own — you stay in the loop for every keystroke that touches a server.
A terminal, a file manager, and a key manager that share state.
Free, open source, and distributed straight from GitHub.
This is a public beta. Builds are not yet notarized on every platform, so your OS may warn on first launch — the full source is on GitHub if you'd rather build it yourself.
What Hawser is, where your data lives, and how to trust it
A desktop SSH and SFTP client: a terminal, a remote file browser, key management, and tunnels in one window. It adds a few things most clients don't — a tamper-evident audit log, searchable session history, and a diff of what changed on a host since you last connected.
Not quite — it's an SSH connection manager with a terminal built in. The point is managing many hosts, transfers, and keys with trust and history, rather than being a drop-in replacement for your local shell terminal.
Nothing. Hawser is free and open source under the MIT license. No account, no subscription, no paid tier.
Windows and Linux builds are available now on GitHub Releases. A signed macOS build is in progress. It's built with Tauri + Rust, so the binary is small and the same code runs across all three.
In your operating system's native secret store: the macOS Keychain, the Windows Credential Manager, or the Linux Secret Service. Hawser never writes passwords or passphrases to a plaintext config file.
Each entry is hashed together with the previous entry's hash, forming a chain — change or remove any entry and every entry after it stops verifying. The chain's head is sealed into your OS keychain as an external anchor, so even deleting or rewriting the whole file is detectable. It records metadata only (host, user, path, byte counts) — never passwords or command output. It's tamper-evident, not tamper-proof: someone with access to both the file and your unlocked keychain could still forge it, and the docs say so plainly.
No telemetry, no analytics, no tracking. The only network connections it makes are the SSH/SFTP sessions you start — and, if you turn on the AI panel, calls to the AI provider whose key you supplied. Everything else stays on your machine.
It's advisor-only. With your own API key, it can suggest commands and explain output, but it never executes anything itself — you review and run every command. The key is stored in the keychain alongside your other secrets, never logged.
Yes — it's all on GitHub, MIT-licensed. The SSH layer uses the pure-Rust russh crate, so there's no system OpenSSL or libssh2 to install and the build is reproducible.
Open an issue on the GitHub repo. Because it's early beta, that feedback shapes what ships next.
Free, open source, and on GitHub now. Windows & Linux today, macOS soon.